Star Watch: Alleged rapist should have been in jail

Feb. 28, 2013

Shawn L. Corbally / Submitted photo

Written by

Alex Campbell and Vic Ryckaert

Det. Dan Smith knew that prosecutors had decided an assault case against convicted rapist Shawn Corbally had fallen apart. He knew that in a matter of hours Corbally would be released from Marion County jail.

But he also knew there just might be a way to keep Corbally locked up.

It all hinged on a seemingly innocuous detail. Corbally had told police he lived in Indianapolis.

Corbally was a sex offender, but he was currently registered in Clinton County. He needed to register in Marion County within 72 hours of moving to Indianapolis.

Not doing so would be a felony for failing to register as a sex offender, and a probation violation -- a scenario that would have kept him in jail and then likely sent him back to prison for potentially five years.

So, Smith hurried over to talk to deputies in the Marion County Sheriff's sex offender compliance unit.

Sheriff's Deputy Michael Stevenson was dispatched to the address Corbally had given. It was his mom's home. Stevenson reported back that she told him her son had been living there for a month. She even signed a witness verification form.

Stevenson seemed to sense the moment. He fired off an email to his supervisor, Lt. Bob Hanna and Richard Veen in the Marion County prosecutor's office, seeking guidance on how to proceed.

"When I file for failing to register," he asked, "what time frame do you want me to use? Just let me know."

"What time frame?" That question mattered. If it was believed Corbally had been living here for longer than 72 hours, he was already out of compliance. If not, they would wait 72 hours -- after he was released --to see if he re-registered, and then try to obtain a warrant for his arrest.

Marion County Sheriff's officials initially agreed to release the ensuing email exchange between Stevenson and Veen, but then declined. Sheriff's spokesman Lt. Col. Louis Dezelan said ultimately it was decided to wait 72 hours.

But reached late Saturday evening, Brienne Delaney, a spokeswoman with the prosecutor's office, said Veen told Stevenson he didn't need to wait 72 hours -- but it appears he didn't push Stevenson to immediately move on the matter, either.

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How the decision was delayed is likely to be a focus of an internal affairs investigation ordered up by Sheriff John Layton.

Five hours after the first email, Corbally was set free. And five days after that, Greenwood police say Corbally broke into a mother-of-two's home armed with a knife and raped her. "Do what I want," he is alleged to have said, "or I will kill the kid."

That was beyond even the 72-hour period and yet still no failure to register charge had been filed. That charge didn't come until Wednesday, the day after he was arrested in Greenwood.

"We want to look into this," Dezelan said, referring to the internal affairs investigation that he said will seek to answer a core question: "Did we do everything we could have done?"

Already, some are saying no.

Anita Carpenter, chief executive officer of the Indiana Coalition Against Sexual Assault, was left dumbfounded.

"Wow," she said, when The Star informed her that Corbally was released despite the possible failure-to-register case. "Wow."

A violent predator was flouting the rules, Carpenter said, and the system let him go.

"This is like a comedy of errors," Carpenter said. "This is a tragedy."

Former Hamilton County prosecutor Sonia Leerkamp also believes Corbally should have been locked up at the time he was accused of committing the rape.

"In a legal sense, and in a perfect world, yes," said Leerkamp, the former prosecutor who also worked in the Marion County prosecutor's office in the 1980s and still is a senior prosecutor in several counties. "Unfortunately, it's not a perfect world."

But are the imperfections in this case an aberration? Or, as some believe, are they illustrative of a failed system where, for whatever reason -- lack of resources, limited work schedules, workload -- many such cases don't receive the type of urgency that seems so necessary, so obvious in hindsight?

A look at how various agencies handled the Corbally case seems to suggest a decided lack of urgency in a number of ways.

From county to county

In 2000, Shawn Corbally pled guilty to two separate rapes and served more than 11 years of a 25-year sentence. He re-entered society in February -- under strict supervision.

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He was designated a "sexually violent predator," ensuring he faced the most stringent restrictions Indiana law had to offer. And he was put on a five-year probation term. Obtaining approval to move from Marion County, where he was released, up north to Clinton County to live with his sister took two months.

In Clinton County, he had to register at the sheriff's office every 90 days. And sheriff's officials were to visit him once every 90 days, too, to make sure he was living where he said he was.

Corbally re-registered in mid-May, and sheriff's officials visited him at the end of that month. On both occasions, he was found to be in compliance. That meant the next time sheriff's deputies would check up on him would be this month.

He also met with probation officials in Clinton County on three occasions, and went to three counseling sessions at a sex offender treatment agency.

But at some point likely in June, Corbally moved to Indianapolis to live with his mother, according to Deputy Stevenson's later interview with her.

Officials wouldn't learn of his possible move, though, until they had picked him up for something else. On July 21, they did.

Another arrest

On that evening, Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officers responded to a call about a female screaming for help. The woman reported that a man with tattoos on his arms and wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt with a marijuana leaf on it had sexually assaulted her.

A witness said he saw the man running away from the area, and told police he was likely at a trailer park about a mile away.

Police eventually found the residence of Shawn Corbally's mother. He was inside -- wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt with a marijuana leaf. And he had distinctive tattoos on his arms.

At 4:53 a.m. on Sunday, July 22, Corbally was booked into the Marion County Arrestee Processing Center. He was now under the custody of the sheriff's department.

On Monday, Lt. Hanna, head of Marion County's sex offender registry unit, checked the weekend arrest slate for sex offenders, as he routinely does. He came across Corbally, and in a 1:28 p.m. email, alerted Clinton County.

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Jeff Cline, Hanna's counterpart in Clinton County, got back to him the next morning, according to Dezelan, the sheriff's spokesman.

Cline said he didn't realize Corbally was gone, and he had been in contact with Corbally two weeks ago, according to Dezelan. (After meeting with The Star on Friday morning, Cline did not respond to multiple messages requesting a follow-up interview on Friday afternoon to confirm that account.)

According to Dezelan, Lt. Hanna talked to Veen at the Marion County prosecutor's office about possibly starting the work to file a warrant for failure to register as a sex offender.

Just hours later, at around 3 p.m., the Marion County prosecutor's office decided not to file sexual assault charges against Corbally. The alleged victim had given conflicting statements, leading officials to believe the charge wouldn't stand up in court.

It was right after that half-hour meeting that IMPD Det. Smith went to the sheriff's office to tell deputies that Corbally was due to be let out -- and that they might still get him on the failure-to-register charge, because he had been living with his mother.

This is according to IMPD spokesman Kendale Adams. Dezelan of the sheriff's office initially told The Star that to his knowledge, sheriff's officials were unaware of Corbally's impending release.

Contacted again, Dezelan did not dispute the IMPD account. "That's new information for me," he said, "and that would certainly be one of the things that the (internal affairs) investigators would look into."

Deputy Stevenson immediately went to Corbally's mother's house, where she told him he had been living there for about a month and signed the witness verification form.

But according to Dezelan, the mother became increasingly angry with Stevenson and ultimately refused to talk to him any more. He said she never told Stevenson precisely when Shawn Corbally moved to her house.

At 4:12 p.m., Stevenson sent his email to Hanna and Veen, seeking guidance on how to proceed.

At 4:17 p.m., Delaney, the spokewoman in the prosecutor's office, said Veen emailed back, instructing Stevenson to set a date a week earlier for when Corbally moved to Indianapolis. That would have meant he was here longer than 72 hours and allowed deputies to obtain an immediate warrant for his arrest.

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Stevenson then emailed back and forth with Veen of the prosecutor's office. According to Dezelan, at 4:29 p.m., Stevenson ended the discussion with this message: I will hold off on this until I get back to the office on Thursday (July 26).

Dezelan said the decision to delay was made, in part, because they were not sure they could reliably prove Corbally's mother's statement was accurate, given the comment by Cline in Clinton County that he had contact with Corbally two weeks ago. Though, that, too would have been well beyond 72 hours.

Then again, Delaney also said it doesn't appear that Veen was actually made aware -- either by Stevenson or anyone else in the prosecutor's office -- that Corbally was about to be released. That might explain his lack of urgency when Stevenson sent his final email saying he would wait for two days to follow up.

Leerkamp, the former Hamilton County prosecutor, said they could have immediately sought the arrest warrant based on the mother's statement -- and they could have done so before Corbally was released.

Five hours later, at 9:38 p.m., Shawn Corbally was freed from jail.

The ensuing five days

Probation officials also did not move quickly.

They did not become aware of Corbally's initial arrest until Monday, the day before he was released.

That's because, like in most counties, nobody generally works on weekends.

Typically, probation officers in Marion County are monitoring 100 to 150 cases at any given time, said Superior Court Judge Lisa Borges. "It's a miracle the probation department here even started looking at it."

Probation officer Jeanine Faulkner contacted Clinton County officials at some point on Tuesday -- a day later -- but presumably still hours before Corbally was released. An officer there told her that Corbally was due to report to the Clinton County office that very day, "but had not yet at the time of the phone conversation," according to probation documents.

It's not clear from probation reports just when probation officials became aware Corbally had been released.

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But two days later, Thursday, July 26, Faulkner knew. She called Corbally's last known phone number and left a voicemail asking him to report to her department, but not until the following Monday at 9 a.m.

That same day, July 26, a man with distinctive tattoos on his arm and who appears to be homeless and in need arrived at the doorstep of 35-year-old Joel Clark.

Clark rents out a couple of houses in Greenwood, and he was at one of them to fix it up after a prior tenant trashed it. Clark figured he and the homeless-looking man could help each other out.

"He asked me for a glass of water and said he had been walking a long way and his feet hurt," Clark later told The Star, interviewed inside the home he is refurbishing on Kenwood Drive. "I told him I'll feed you and shelter you if you help me."

Clark was aware that Shawn Corbally had been in some trouble with the law but he wasn't aware of a rape conviction. And he wasn't especially concerned.

"To be honest," Clark said, "I was homeless, too, a while back. I understand people can have trials in life and need a hand."

On Friday, July 27, Faulkner's supervisor Melanie Pitstick left Corbally a second voice message, asking him to get in touch with her immediately. Pitstick left his mother a voicemail, too.

At 9:38 p.m. that night, Corbally's 72 hours to come into compliance with the sex offender registry ran out. But there was still a delay.

Deputy Stevenson figured that since it was a Friday night and the prosecutor who would handle this was on a normal 40-hour-a-week schedule, he should wait until Monday morning.

The alleged rape

Back in Greenwood, Joel Clark said he wasn't getting the help he needed from Corbally. Tension was mounting, so on Saturday he decided to take Corbally to a bar.

They drank buckets of Budweiser, Clark said, and danced with some women.

But when it was time to go, Clark said Corbally grew angry they were leaving without female company.

Sometime after 3:45 a.m., police say, a man broke into a woman's house only a short walk from where Corbally had been staying.

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He put a hand over her mouth and pressed a knife to her throat.

He cut her underwear off with the knife and proceeded to rape her, possibly for up to two hours. The whole time, the man had a knife "either against her neck or some other place on her body," according to Greenwood Police documents.

At some point, someone who was exercising saw a man leading a naked woman through the grass behind the apartment complex. The man released her, and she cried out. She told police she has been raped.

On Monday, July 30 -- the day Corbally was supposed to report to Marion County probation -- Greenwood police released a media alert. A "concerned citizen" called in saying he believed it was Corbally, based on the physical description and the tattoos.

On Tuesday, Greenwood Police found and arrested Corbally.

On Wednesday -- 11 days after Corbally was arrested for assault, eight days after IMPD informed deputies he said he was living in Indianapolis, eight days after the was released from jail, five days after the 72 hours officials had given him to re-register, three days after he was accused of rape again, and a day after he was arrested again on a rape charge-- the Marion County sheriff's office filed its warrant for failure to register as a sex offender and the probation office filed a violation notice.